How Corporations Are Creating a Life-Threatening Water Shortage

Reprinted from occupy.comIImagine the swift and fierce government response if Al-Qaeda took a
precious resource out of a delicate environment, sold it for profit and
endangered 40 million people in the process. Now compare that example to
the nonexistent government response to American energy companies, golf
courses and corporations like Nestle taking 75 percent of the
groundwater out of the Colorado River Basin at a time when the American
West is facing a record drought.Corporations will continue to abuse their constitutional protections
as legal "persons" until fresh water has become fully privatized, or
until corporate constitutional rights are eliminated with a
constitutional amendment.Depleting a Precious ResourceNestle has two plants on the Colorado River Basin that take in water
to bottle and sell under its Arrowhead and Pure Life brands. One is in Salida, Colorado, on the eastern edge of the Upper Basin; the other is in the San Gorgonio Pass,
halfway between San Bernardino and Indio, Calif., on the western edge
of the Lower Basin. According to annual reports filed up to 2009, Nestle
bottles between 595 and 1,366 acre-feet of water per year -- enough to
flood that many acres under a foot of water -- from the California
source. The company takes 200 additional acre-feet per year from the
Colorado source. This means altogether Nestle is draining the Colorado
River Basin of anywhere from 250 million to 510 million gallons of water
per year, according to the acre-feet-to-gallons conversion calculator.

The Colorado River Basin
is an especially critical water resource, responsible for supplying
municipal water to 40 million Americans and irrigating 5.5 million acres
of land. As the US Bureau of Reclamation has documented,
22 federally-recognized tribes, seven national wildlife refuges, four
national recreation areas, and 11 national parks depend on the basin. In
a new report by NASA and the University of California at Irvine,
researchers discovered that between December of 2004 and November of
2013, the basin lost 53 million acre-feet
of water. 41 million acre-feet, or 75 percent of that loss, came from
groundwater sources, like those pumped by Nestle. That's more than twice
the amount of water contained in Lake Mead, America's largest
freshwater reservoir. In the meantime, Nestle, with 29 water bottling
facilities across North America, pocketed $4 billion in revenue from bottled water sales in 2012 alone.

But Nestle isn't alone in abusing the main water source of the
Western United States. Expansive golf courses in desert areas, like
those in Arizona and Southern California, require hundreds of thousands
of gallons of water per day to maintain. According to the United States
Golf Association (USGA), 2 million acres of American golf courses are
irrigated, or 80 percent of the country's total golf course acreage. Between 2003 and 2005,
the USGA estimated that 2,312,701 acre-feet of water was used to
maintain golf courses, amounting to over 2 billion gallons of water per
day. An NPR report from 2008 put that in perspective, comparing the
average daily water usage of one golf course to the amount of water used
by one American family over the course of 4 years.An "Insurmountable" Water Crisis by 2040Egregious abuses of limited freshwater supplies have led to panic
from some and greed from others. If current drought conditions and water
usage patterns persist, it's estimated that the world will face an
"insurmountable" water crisis by 2040. Aarhaus University of Denmark,
the Vermont Law School and the nonprofit CNA Corporation recently released a study
showing that a global population increase compounded by an exponential
increase in water consumption will inevitably lead to drastic drought
conditions unless immediate action is taken. The study projected a 40
percent gap between water supply and demand by 2030 under current
conditions.According to the study, 41 percent of American freshwater consumption
came from energy production alone. Energy sources like nuclear and coal
power were responsible for the bulk of water consumption, though the
process of hydraulic fracturing -- better known as fracking, where jets
of water mixed with chemicals are blasted underground to break up shale
formations that produce natural gas -- was also high on the list. A
prime example is Texas, where the population is expected to skyrocket from 25 million to 55 million in the next 35 years.
Texas currently draws 91 percent of its electricity from natural gas,
nuclear and coal power. And in the summer of 2011, Texas experienced its
worst drought in history.Outdoing Texas, California is now facing its worst drought in 1,200
years. Latest numbers from the National Drought Mitigation Center show
that 80 percent of California is in "extreme drought."
A full 31 percent of California is experiencing "exceptional drought"
conditions, including population centers like Los Angeles, Oakland, and
San Francisco. Food prices have gone up by an average of 2.5 percent
since last year, and are expected to increase by another 3.5 percent
before year's end. No less than 85 percent of the lettuce Americans eat comes from drought-ravaged California. Fresh fruits and vegetable prices are projected to increase by 6 percent in the coming months as a result of the drought.Constitutionally-Protected Corporate GreedThe research community isn't the only group of people paying
attention to the writing on the wall. Corporate executives are quickly
making moves to privatize water resources, declaring the resource to be the next oil. Peter Brabeck, chairman and former CEO of Nestle, has openly said that "access to water is not a public right." This is in spite of UN Resolution 64/292,
which declares that water and sanitation are both basic human rights.
The World Health Organization has said that one person needs 20 liters of water for "survival" levels of use,
including bathing and laundry. As I wrote previously for Occupy.com,
the France-based Suez company is using a New Jersey-based subsidiary to
prepare a buyout of Detroit's water infrastructure, with a potential end
goal of privatizing the Detroit River and the Great Lakes.Researchers argue for greater regulation of water usage to prevent
future global drought, though that becomes complicated when looking into
how such regulations would be implemented and enforced. The US Bureau
of Reclamation monitors surface water, but groundwater regulation is up
to individual states. And in the Colorado River Basin, for example, California has no regulations on groundwater usage
despite the Bay Area implementing strict new penalties for excessive
use of water. Even if federal or state agencies wanted to intervene to
stop corporate entities like golf courses, power companies or Nestle
from using up precious groundwater resources, corporations and their
profits are protected under the constitution, giving them the same
rights as actual human beings.Ever since the Supreme Court established that corporations are legally people in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
ruling of 1886, corporations have successfully overridden a slew of
regulations citing the equal protection clause under the 14th Amendment.
By proving that a certain regulation would unduly infringe on a
corporation's ability to make a profit, well-heeled corporate entities
have lawyered up to defy regulatory agencies for over a century. The Buckley v. Valeo ruling in 1976 further ensconced corporate personhood, and the Citizens United v. FEC
ruling in January of 2010 established the precedent that because
corporations have the same legal rights as a person, their money is
considered free speech. So not only can corporations defy any new
regulation on their future usage of precious water resources, but they
can spend unlimited amounts of money in election cycles to elect
politicians who will prioritize their right to make a profit over a
citizen's right to have access to water.As long as corporations are given the same constitutional protections
as people, they'll always escape regulation and accountability for
their actions. Simply "getting money out of politics" is not enough --
only a constitutional amendment that explicitly abolishes the concept of
corporate personhood and separates money from free speech will
guarantee that necessary actions can be taken to prevent a disastrous
water shortage.
Carl Gibson, is a spokesman and organizer for US Uncut, a nonviolent,
creative direct-action movement to stop budget cuts by getting
corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. Contact Carl on the
Commons. -